News

Dr Cliff Forshaw gave a reading with Selima Hill at Birmingham Repertory Theatre on Saturday 21 November. The event launched Cliff's Wake and Selima's Advice on Animal Prints, the first of a new series of chapbooks from Flarestack Poets:

http://www.flarestackpoets.co.uk/index.htm

The reading was recorded by Radio Wildfire for web broadcast in the New Year. Cliff also published a poem in the 2009 Flarestack anthology My Barton isn't Paying, and in the Templar 2009 Poetry Collection Competition anthology Stripe. He also published a chapter on adapting his poem sequence Trans for performance: ‘“Of shapes transformed to bodies strange”: Metamorphic Forms and Personae in Poems from Page to Performance’ appeared in Classical and Contemporary Mythic Identities: Construction of the Literary Imagination, eds Amina Alyal and Paul Hardwick (Mellen, 2009). 

Dr Sabine Vanacker was an invited speaker at the ‘Imagining Amsterdam’ conference, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam University College, 19-21 November 2009.  She presented a paper in a panel on ‘Images of Amsterdam as a “(Multi)Cultural Archive”‘.  Her paper was entitled ‘Een Nederlandse Amerikaan: Janwillem van de Wetering, Indonesians, Japanese, Surinamese, Chinese and… Frisians in a Multicultural Amsterdam’.  Dr Vanacker  has also been invited to speak at ‘The Golden Age of Detective Fiction’ day school, Oxford University, on Saturday 28 November 2009.  The topic of her lecture was ‘Christie’s Criminals: Culpability, Deviance and Guilt’.

 

Professor Ann Heilmann presented an invited paper on ‘Neo-Victorian experiments on Darwin, the scientific explorer, and gender’ at the 'Darwin Our Contemporary’ conference at the University of Siegen, Germany, 27-28 November 2009. She was also invited to join the Executive Committee of the Feminist and Women's Studies Association and to oversee the FWSA Small Grants Scheme.

 

Dr Jane Thomas gave a Keynote lecture at the Hardy Day school in Sheffield on Saturday 14th November 2009, hosted by the Thomas Hardy Society (Northern Branch) entitled ‘"Not Quite a Model Woman": Hardy’s Heroines and Goddesses’ .

 

Professor Martin Goodman presented a paper at the NAWE (National Association of Writers in Education ) annual conference, a 90 minute session of robust discussion on the best approaches to teaching creative writing at University.

 

Professor Valerie Sanders gave a talk on ‘Jane Austen’s Plausible Villains’ for the annual guest evening of Hull Women’s Literary Club on 24 November.

 

Dr David Wheatley attempted to ingratiate himself with Irish comedian Dara O Briain by writing about him for the TLS (13 November). He wrote on ‘Larkin and Sidney Keyes, or, The Case of the Mechanical Turd’, for About Larkin 28 (October 2009), pp. 17-19, and about Leach’s petrels and other birds for the website Verse Palace:

 

http://versepalace.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/david-wheatley-looking-out-the-window/

 

David’s poem ‘On Tory Island’ also featured in Best Irish Poetry in English 2010 (ed. Matthew Sweeney, Southword Editions), the fourth consecutive year his work has featured in this series.